2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple's iPad however, not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It's not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad however, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along?

Unlocked bootloader is just one part of the puzzle. The biggest issue are hardware drivers. Do the Thrive's graphics have a driver that works in a traditional Linux distro? Same for other components: touchscreen, sound, wifi, etc.

And even if the drivers are available, there's the big chance they're tied to a specific version of the kernel and X, like with Intel Poulsbo. No way am I going to restrict myself like that.
All drivers don't necessarily need to be open source, I use the Nvidia blob for example, but that only works because Nvidia is constantly updating the driver when new versions of the kernel and X require it.